Your Amazon Echo smart speaker just got a little bit smarter

October 18, 2016

Transcript

[MUSIC]
Hey guys, I'm here in the CNET smart home with a trio of Alexa Echo devices here from Amazon to test out the new echo spacial perception feature, the new feature that's rolling out to every Echo device that's already out on the market via software update.
That include the original Amazon Echo first-generation Amazon Echo Dot mini-speaker and the new $50 second-gen Echo Dot mini-speaker.
Now, all echo spacial perception, or ESP, as it's called, really is is the ability for different Echo devices to distinguish which one is closest to you when you say the wake word, usually Alexa.
So if I say Alexa, all three will wake up, but only the closest one should respond to me.
let's turn the mute off on all these.
So if I had to guess I would say that the original Amazon Echo here is the one that's going to respond to me because it's got the microphone up at the top of the device a little closer to my voice, and the two echo dots down here.
But let's give it a shot.
Alexa.
Tell me a joke.
What did the shy pebble wish?
[UNKNOWN]
It's really a bad joke.
As you can see [UNKNOWN] got in the middle is the one that piped up to me, is the one right in front of me.
So I guess, that makes sense.
Let's try it again, spread the device [UNKNOWN] The room here and see how it does.
Alexa, what's the capitol of Sweden?
Sweden's capitol city is Stockholm.
Now ESP is a pretty important rollout for Amazon because it envisions us having Alexa not just in every home but in every room of every home.
And that won't work so well if all of the devices in your home are all piping up at once every time you try to use one of Little bite.
The echo space which represent an update is live now, so, if you got echo device in your home already or a couple of devices you start to notice that they only pipe out one at a time.
You also find it already [UNKNOWN] in this new [UNKNOWN].
That shipping out people [INAUDIBLE]
[MUSIC].